Detroit Resurrection, New Republic style

Several decades ago, Detroit's city fathers fathered a development called the Renaissance Center. Today, Detroit's urban core looks like a renaissance, all right -- of Berlin in 1945. It is the very symbol of a failed city. I don't know what, if anything, can be done to revive it. But Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, writing in The New Republic, think they do.

Before getting into their prescription, let me acknowledge that as leftist periodicals go, The New Republic is sane, even when it's wrong. It generally steers wide of the kind of hysteria and fanaticism so often found in "progressive" publications and blog sites. If the writing tends to the academic, it at least shows evidence of thought.

The Katz and Bradley piece, while reasonably argued within its own premises, shows how entrenched in the liberal mind are certain notions that seem never to change. Here are some quoted excerpts to show you what I mean. The boldface emphasis is mine.

This year alone, at least 48 Detroit public-school employees have been investigated for fraud--which might help explain why only one in four high school freshmen ever receives a diploma.

It might, or it might not. Presumably those fraudsters were guilty of embezzlement or something on that order. I suspect few if any stole the students' schoolbooks or their teachers' chalk. Perhaps the result has more to do with the students themselves, their lack of future-time orientation, and their subculture with its contempt for learning. But Katz and Bradley would probably say that's "blaming the victim."

Institutions developed at the height of Detroit’s postwar prosperity remain--and provide the city with advantages that similarly depressed industrial cities cannot claim. It has educational institutions in or near the city (the University of Michigan, Wayne State) and medical institutions (in part, a legacy of all those union health care plans) that are innovative powerhouses and that currently generate private-sector activity in biomedicine, information technology, and health care management.

Institutions. Always institutions. Leftists have faith in groups, official bodies, organizations. They may well be an asset, but since they have been operating all along, they don't seem to have done much to stop Detroit's slide into destitution.

And there is already a smattering of examples of old industrial outposts that have reacquired relevance. An old GM plant in Wixom has been retrofitted to produce advanced batteries. There’s a new automotive-design lab based in Ann Arbor. And Ford, the most promising of the Big Three, has made a decisive shift toward smaller, cleaner cars.

That, too, is fine. But it hasn't helped so far. How many people from the central city will a few auto design labs employ? Can battery makers replace car makers as a driver of prosperity? Smaller, cleaner cars may be good for the country, but what's good for the country isn't necessarily good for Detroit.

Retooling Detroit’s old industries and advancing its new ones will take public money, and the feds are the only ones with money to give these days. But Washington already spends heavily on Detroit--$18.4 billion went to the city and the surrounding county in 2008.

Wrong. "The feds" have no money to give these days. First, the feds cannot give money of their own, only money they have extracted through taxes -- including taxes on companies. Second, even the cutpurse government is broke, bankrupt, in debt to the tune of $13 trillion and counting (not including the cost of future entitlement programs).

A better return on federal investments will take a functioning local government as well as leadership in suburban counties that is willing to collaborate closely with the city. And, with so much sclerosis, change will only emerge with a strong hand from above.

A strong hand from above. A mighty fortress is our God, the government.

Leadership in suburban counties that is willing to collaborate closely with the city. Get real. Those suburban counties are populated largely by people who move there to escape the tar pit that is the central city. Here's a cell phone -- call someone who cares. Of course, to our authors, those suburbanites, many of whom are struggling like the rest of the country in the Great Recession, are "the rich." They should give till it hurts.

State and federal governments should place the city’s most dysfunctional agencies in receivership ... These higher-level governments should also insist that the city and its suburbs end their wasteful bickering and act as one on issues that naturally cross borders, like transportation and the environment.

If you can't work it out, Motown and 'burbs, the higher-level government's gonna insist. History has many examples of what happens when higher-level governments insist.

Because of the current credit desert, these companies should receive low-interest loans that allow them to reconfigure their plants to produce parts that can be sold to the international auto market--or for other types of machinery. And local government (or NGOs, even) can play the role of industrial planner. That is, they can look across the map and find instances where research institutions and manufacturers should collaborate on new ventures.

Industrial planning. We've read about that, although maybe schools don't teach it these days. A certain regime was keen on five-year plans. Leftists believe only chaos can result if individuals, or groups of individuals, find their own solutions. The answers, to be valid for them, must come from politicians, bureaucrats, committees, think tanks -- anyone but the people being planned for.

European cities faced a similar challenge. After decades of population and job loss, they were saddled with an excess of housing and too much unproductive, polluted, or vacant land. This derelict land was as much an economic problem as a physical one, depressing property values and repelling new investments. So these cities reconfigured themselves into denser communities ...

Leftists hate "wasted" space around people's homes. The residents are anti-social, anti-community for wanting some land of their own. They must be re-educated, gathered into "efficient" high-rises.

This physical regeneration, much more than economic reorientation, is where governments have a major role.

Where don't they, in the new republic?

The great object lesson is Bilbao, Spain. As in Turin, leaders--in this case, the Basque regional government, worried about the condition of its largest city--created a master plan and two public-private agencies to support it, one of which, Bilbao Ria, focused specifically on managing large-scale land-cleanup-and-revitalization projects.

Government again. Master plan.

The new Detroit might be a patchwork of newly dense neighborhoods, large and small urban gardens, art installations, and old factories transformed into adventure parks.

Bring the kids to Blightland! Have fun wrench tightening at the Assembly Line Castle! Ride to the top of the smokestack! It's a pall world after all.

... The Obama administration is weighing a high-speed-rail plan that would link Detroit to Chicago and other Midwestern cities.

What will it do for passengers after the one-way traffic ends?

The federal government could support the physical regeneration of Detroit by footing the bill for the development of a new city plan focused on reconfiguring land uses and economic activity around the reality of population loss. More radically, the feds could overhaul that tired cliché of urban policy: the community-development block grant. They should require Detroit and other cities to use these grants (and other federal, state, and local resources) for reclaiming, reconfiguring, and reusing vacant and abandoned land and housing.

This whole article is a tired cliché of urban policy. Big Daddy government; tax money given to Detroiters with certain, er, requirements. Katz and Bradley's vision isn't just straight from the ivory tower. It's immoral. It's an imposed design using other people's money, funneled through institutions, destined to further central government control. Nobody had to dump grants and funding into the city to make it once the Mecca of American industry. If Detroit can't fix itself, it doesn't deserve fixing. Cities, like people, sometimes need tough love.